Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Conventional light detection and ranging (LIDAR) systems are configured to emit laser light pulses into an environment of the system. Objects within the environment may reflect the laser light pulses. At least a portion of the reflected light may be detected as received light pulses by a receiver portion of the LIDAR system. Distances to the objects within the environment may be determined based on respective time delays between the emitted light pulses and corresponding received light pulses.
Optical heterodyne detection includes a non-linear optical mixing of an unmodulated signal and a signal modulated at a local oscillator frequency. The non-linear optical mixing may occur when detecting the superimposed optical signals at a square-law detector. The detection process produces signals at the sum and difference frequencies of the unmodulated signal and the modulated signal.